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Showing posts from August, 2007

Playing Strong with people my own weight.

I went to Oishi's today. I haven't been going in a while, and Sensei Oishi made a comment about my not being here in a long time, but then when I informed him that I was going to Sensei Watanabe's club, he seemed pleasantly surprised. There were a good bunch of people today - entirely brown and black belts, and mostly big guys - people over 200lbs (90+ kgs) that presented good challenges in Randori and ne-waza . I went a couple of Rounds with a Sandan (3rd Degree blackbelt) who I matched up nicely with Sizewise. While I did pretty much all of the falling, I was pleased with some of the attacks of my own that as well as some of the defenses I had against his throws. I think I am finally getting comfortable with an attacking style, now I need to find a competition.

The Jar of Rocks

Recently, I have been using a parable to describe the Judo learning process, and I wanted to share it with you. I first learned about this parable in a non-Judo context, but nonetheless it can be ascribed to Judo, or to virtually anything else in your career, life, relationships, etc. A couple of years ago I was meeting with a work colleague in her office. I noticed an interesting Jar of rocks on her desk. I asked her what the Jar was for and she explained that the Jar was given to her as part of an exercise at a management conference. Essentially, the concept is like this: You need to fill the jar with rocks. First you start with big rocks, and cram as many of them into the Jar as possible. When you are done with those, you can seemingly think that the jar is full, but it isn't. While you might have all of the big rocks in the Jar, there are still plenty of gaps between the rocks that need to be filled. So you start with smaller pebbles, until you don't have any more room fo

Sparking some thoughts about Rank

Last night, I was practicing Nage-No-Kata with a fellow brown belt under the watchful eye of one of our Senior black belts who also does a lot of refereeing and at one point was a Kata Examiner.  It's really good to have him reviewing my kata as I learn it, because he provides me with advice from the big picture (i.e. how to transit from one throw to the next) all the way down to the smallest details (your knee needs to be at a 45 degree angle when you finish Sumi Otoshi). At the end of Kata practice, he mentioned that I was progressing nicely. I mentioned that I thought it would take me a year before I could perform Nage-no-Kata.  Then he said something to me: "I think Sensei wants you to do it sooner - you are an Ikkyu , aren't you?". "Actually, " I replied, " I am just a Sankyu ." I realize that I haven't had a change in Rank since returning to Judo almost 3 years ago. Originally, I thought I would go to promotional shiai , but unfortunatel

YouTube and Judo

Now that I am learning Nage-No-Kata , I am finding instructional Judo Video more useful than ever. I just did a search for Nage-No-Kata on YouTube and came up with a dozen or so results. Videos from the US, Japan, Europe and more. It's amazing how the Internet can bring global resources to the edge of my desk - even for learning Judo! The video below is an excerpt of the Kodokan's official Nage no kata video.

Switching Sides

About 2 years ago, after competing (and losing all 3 of my matches) in a tournament, I asked my Sensei for some feedback. His advice was super helpful, but the one thing that stood out was that he noticed, that as dominant lefty, somewhere in middle of one of my matches I switched to playing right-handed. He told me that I should have stayed lefty and played to my strengths. I explained to him that the reason why I didn't play left-handed was because my opponent was holding down his right lapel to prevent me from getting a grip (My sensei pointed out that this is illegal according to tournament rules, and he should have received a Shido penalty, but he did it discretely so that the refs didn't notice). Nonetheless, I continued to practice the left-sided technique even harder, to the point where I almost exclusively fight left-handed at tournaments and Randori. There is a lot of benefit to being a lefty in Judo. Opposing grips make it easier for me to get in closer to my oppon